~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
I’ve been living in Germany for the last nine months. One of my goals is to improve my German skills, and guess what, I am getting better. But still my German is still far from perfect. Occasionally I will be in a conversation (ok more than occasionally) and I will try to guess about meaning. Sometimes I guess kind of right, which means that I will make a kind of odd response to a question. …
This morning, armchair scientist and noted fan of this blog, Razib Khan, decided it would be prudent to write about race. It comes by way of Khan issuing a corrective, of sorts, to Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The Coates article is wonderful. He takes a historical look at how race has been deployed over the last 150 years. Along the way, he makes all the good points that can be made with the census, and some others as well.…
We have had a good week on Ethnography.com grappling with the diffrerences between the Social Sciences, and the Cognitive Sciences. Last month it was the Social Sciences and Population Genetics.
I am of course a Social Scientist, and much more in tune with what Michael Scroggins and Max Holland write. They are squarely in the traditions of the social sciences regarding the nature of culture, definitions, and interpretations of data. They are also well-read in the natural sciences, and trying to tie the two fields together, a difficult task. …
Donald Campbell was one of the leading psychologists of the second half of the twentieth century. His was a time of optimism for planners—there was a belief that the power of technology could be brought to bear on many of the world’s ills. And indeed they were, often with positive effects. As a result of central planning, more people receive water, more places are electrified, more children educated, and more diseases eradicated. …
by Maximilian Holland
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination (Dennett 1995)
An inherent feature of the practice of observation in empirical science is its dependence upon how perception is ordered into description via language and communicated to others. This is true for social, physical, behavioral and other sciences; all are inextricably dependent upon language and pre-existing concepts. …
Steve Hsu has been on a tear lately. Giving talks about IQ, here and here, and partnering with BGI to sequence the genomes of “high cognition” individuals in a quest to solve the giant “problem” of IQ. This effort has hit Vice magazine, Slate, and, more recently, NPR. To give you the CliffsNotes version of Hsu’s argument: IQ is a quantitative trait, just like height and can therefore be selected for improvement.…
In this installment of the seriocomic series Incidental Anthropology, I bring you three more media stories which incidentally illustrate anthropological points. Given the recent back and forth on this blog over genetics, I highly recommend the first link.
1) Why are Americans so focused on how “cognitively advanced” their children are?
2) Some thoughts on Elsevier’s purchase of Mendeley and what this might mean for Open Access and academic publishing.
3) The complex career and photography of Hiroshi Hamaya with a view towards the relation of snow and spirit.…
As Tony pointed out, the back and forth on this blog over population genetics has produced some smoke, some heat and some insights into what a gene might be and how much it can say about the everyday lives of human beings.
Today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics. At stake are some the same questions we have been debating at ethnography.com…
Jared Diamond has created a lot of heat in the anthropological blogosphere in the last few months. So much heat in fact, that Rex at Savage Minds is now in a position to write a “review of the reviews” in an April 2013 post here. Quite and achievement for a 512 page book published on December 31, 2012! When do reviewers have time to read such a book, and also come up with a thoughtful review?…
In this long overdue installment of Incidental Anthropology I bring you a few examples of anthropology interest incidentally found in the media.
First, the vexing question of how to handle to infant waste and some ingenious responses: here
Second, how have tourists in American National Parks changed over the last 30 years? Not much: here
Third, how do you test a method of building phylogenic trees without using actual organisms? With invented organisms called Caminalcules: here
Finally, Jeff Bezos has pulled an F-1 rocket engine from the sea floor.…
Mark Dawson’s April 2012 post “Why I Chose not to Get a PhD” post has been one of the more popular postings at Ethnography.com. There is also a good comment stream at the end of the post with a number of “attaboys,” and “that’ll tell’em Mark!” Such posts seem to appeal to the existential angst that afflicts anthropology in a world of budget cuts.
The most recent comments to the post are by Bill who has worked for the National Park Service and US Forest Service. …
Another new country, and region of the world. This time it is the country of Antigua, in the Caribbean where I am on vacation for 10 days. Going new places assaults the senses, as you the old categories brought from elsewhere prove inadequate to frame what you hear and see. That is why it is often interesting and important to write down thoughts when you first arrive, before the comfort of automaticity sits in, and even though, by definition, things are still “impressionistic.” …